At the end of the 1980s, George Harrison was starting to make his career renaissance. After spending most of the decade going on holiday and making the occasional song for a movie soundtrack, Harrison had quietly retired from the public eye to focus on his family life back home. When he began working with Jeff Lynne, something started to change.
Aside from forming the Traveling Wilburys, Cloud Nine marks the first collaboration between Harrison and the ELO frontman behind the producer’s chair, guiding Harrison into the next phase of his career. So with a new album on the horizon and the man behind some of the best classic rock of the ’70s, what does Harrison have in the tank?
Well, as the album starts with the title track, fans are promised a far more mellow side of Harrison than they’re used to. Even with Eric Clapton providing a mini-duet with Harrison on lead guitar, most of this song feels like the same kind of B-side material that would turn up on songs by some of Harrison’s fellow Wilburys.
Although things get started with the distilled sounds of dad rock, ‘If That’s What It Takes’ is the Harrison that most fans got to know back in the early ’70s, as he espouses wisdom about what it takes to reach God with a clever chord sequence plonking away in the background. That same upbeat energy comes back elsewhere on the album like ‘Fish On the Sand’, which spends most of its runtime riding a Beatle-esque guitar riff.
In fact, this might be the closest Harrison has come to reaching his Beatles magic since his ’70s period, with ‘This Is Love’ having its feet planted in his glory years and the (then) modern age as if Robert Smith had written a George Harrison song at his poppiest. Although there are some decent moments across Cloud Nine, some of the Beatles-worship might get laid on a bit too thick on tracks like ‘When We Was Fab’.
While the track is a decent enough song about Harrison reminiscing on his glory days, the result feels a lot more jagged than one should expect from one of the people who worked on Abbey Road. Since Lynne had a hand in writing a handful of songs on the record, it’s hard not to think of this song as him trying to put together his very own Beatles track from the ground up. Outside of a decent hook and a rare appearance by Harrison on the sitar, the song tends to promise much more than it delivers.
From a lyrical point of view, though, Harrison is still the wise guru that most fans have gotten to know throughout the years. Even on the slower moments of the record, Harrison can slip in allusions to his faith, like the religious quality behind the vocal harmonies on a song like ‘Just For Today’ or using the backing vocals ‘Dharma’ on ‘This Is Love’. Although Harrison might have been trying to reach a more pop-tinged market with this album, it’s nice to know that he never forgot his spiritualism.
Even a handful of social commentary tracks harken back to Harrison’s roots on songs like ‘Taxman’. Although a song like ‘Devil’s Radio’ could have easily come off as corny, Harrison’s reminder of not letting tabloids dictate everyone’s thinking is fairly prophetic, considering the influencer culture of the modern world.
While most of this album might be presented as a warm hug from ‘The Quiet Beatle’, one of its biggest stumbling blocks comes from Lynne’s production. Though his work would do well for The Beatles Anthology and The Wilburys, Lynne sounds like he’s still working through how to make a proper George Harrison album and creates walls of sound that tend to feel too mechanical to hear the actual version of Harrison. If the lyrical content was taken out, there’s a good chance that listeners could mistake some of the songs for some of the B-material from someone like Tom Petty.
There are also a handful of cuts where even Harrison begins to lose the plot. While the title track might have had the lush sounds of dad rock, Harrison shows his middle age on ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’, talking about how he isn’t exactly a spring chicken anymore. Although there’s nothing wrong with Harrison showing his age at this point in his career, it’s hard to take some of the spiritual material at face value knowing these songs are next.
And right before the album finishes, ‘Breath Away From Heaven’ remains one of Harrison’s most toothless songs. Sounding like a half-baked Chinese homage, the tune was intended for the film Shanghai Surprise, and considering how the film went, it should have been painfully forgotten along with it. With some of the most generic strings on the record, the tune was likely meant to evoke Chinese culture, but in context, it comes off as more of a stereotype of the customs.
For all of the modern sounds of this album, it was the oldest song that became its biggest hit, with a cover of James Ray’s ‘Got My Mind Set On You’ earning Harrison one of his last major hits. Compared to the rest of the album, it’s strange hearing Harrison sound so alive on this track, even getting a little soulful in the verses. Throughout the entire album’s worth of material, this song is the easiest to love because it’s easy to hear Harrison enjoy himself while making it.
So after years retired from music, Cloud Nine has more than its fair share of rough edges. Although it holds together as a great time capsule before Harrison formed the Traveling Wilburys, the album tends to feel aimless in spots and more like Harrison making tunes for himself more than anything. Granted, even some decent Beatles solo records are still another artist’s left field, but when compared to his entire body of work, Harrison has done better.
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